Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to business performance visualization and more particularly to the graphical interpretation of business performance.
Description of the Related Art
Business performance analysis has existed for centuries. Analyzing the health of a business begins with a view of revenues and expenses and continues through a deep view of trends in sales, pinpointing with some accuracy the source of revenue, and the relatedness of expenses to those revenues. Ultimately, the goal of business performance analysis is to facilitate decision making amongst the managers of the business including decisions relating to marketing expenditures, human resources, inventory level management and sales programming. Yet, absent the power of the computer processing, crunching the requisite data to produce a visualization of performance data in order to facilitate business performance analysis is a manually intensive task not easily undertaken.
The advent of the era of computing, however, has enabled business managers to collect data at an atomic level of business performance and to crunch an incredible volume of such data to produce a wide selection of visualizations illustrative of the performance not only of the business in its entirety, but also of the performance of different aspects of the business. Indeed, the different ways to report and visualize the performance of different aspects of a business is so robust, the ultimate analysis of the business can be lost in a sea of detailed imagery thus defeating the purpose, in the first instance, of generating the visualizations. As such, what is needed is a simplistic and stimulating way to present a visualization of the performance of a business.